King’s Speech

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Wednesday 20th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, it has been a truly interesting and wide-ranging debate. I hope that noble Lords will forgive me if I confine my remarks to the transport aspects of the debate. There were a number of interesting speeches in respect of transport. I do not propose to respond to them all, but I would like to single out the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, who I think deserves a rather doleful prize. For over 15 years now, he has been the Cassandra figure wandering across the stage from left to right periodically, telling everyone that HS2 was going to cost £100 billion. There is a great deal of blame to go around in respect of HS2, but none of it falls at the door of the noble Lord. Cassandra eventually has to be shown to be right; we know now that he has been right all along.

I want to start by referring to the circumstances, rather than the content, of the gracious Speech. I think it is fair to say that it was, frankly, painful to see His Majesty peering over the top of his Speech at a Prime Minister standing below Bar, of whom nobody knew whether he would still be in office 24 hours later. How has it come to this after less than two years? When Disraeli referred to Gladstone’s Front Bench as being like

“a range of exhausted volcanoes”,

he was at least acknowledging that they were volcanoes. We have been inflicted with something more like a row of molehills, from which the moles have departed. The rapidly leaving ranks of Ministers who are flooding out are now saying quite openly that the Labour Party was wholly unprepared for Government. How have we got to this stage?

However, we have a ready-wrapped solution at hand: Mr Burnham, and what is known as “Manchesterism”. I have looked into Manchesterism. It is very relevant to this debate, because it boils down to a transport policy. Manchesterism is, in essence, the fact that Mr Burnham has taken control of the buses and put a £2 fare cap in. It is worth saying that the £2 cap was, of course, a Conservative policy; that it was the Conservative policy to continue it, and that it was the Labour Party that put it up to £3 in every other part of the country.

When we think about the mechanism by which Mr Burnham has taken control of the buses in Manchester, let us remember that it was a Conservative Government that gave him the powers to do so. The mechanism he has used to take control of the buses is, of course, a franchising system in which the buses are still owned and operated by private companies, but he sets the fares, the routes and the timetables. In other words, it is a system wholly copied from what has been operating in London since roughly the 1980s. One could almost call it “Londonism”. Who was it who, in the 1985 Act, created that system in London? It was, of course, Mrs Thatcher. We might even say that it comes down to being called “Thatcherism”.

However, there is another paradox here. That very system of franchising, where contracts are let on a concession basis to private companies to provide the bus services, is exactly the system that the noble Lord the Minister has vehemently rejected in relation to the operation of the trains. In his paradise, the trains have to be owned and run by Great British Railways, and there is to be no room at all for any sort of competition, except where it exists already. Since we know where we are coming from, that makes me wonder whether the noble Lord the Minister has yet made the pilgrimage to Wigan to knock on a few doors and make inquiries of Mr Burnham as to whether he still backs the Great British Railways Bill with this mechanism, which is not part of the Manchesterist approach at all.

There is more to say about this Great British Railways Bill. Another thing that is going on is that, overnight, the Labour Party has become a party that wants to rejoin the European Union. Mr Streeting—I am putting Mr Starmer aside as being what might be described as a short-dated stock—wants to join the European Union, and he says so. Mr Burnham also wants to join the European Union, but he would prefer not to say so. Yet the one thing that is absolutely not compatible with being a member of the European Union is a Great British Railways structure in which there is no competition allowed—except, I grant you, temporarily for existing open-access operators. To exclude competition is completely incompatible with the EU’s railways directive.

Indeed, if we did rejoin the European Union, and Deutsche Bahn, or SNCF, or one of the private Italian railway companies turned up and said that they would like to run a service on Great British Railways’ tracks, and we were to refuse them on the basis of this Bill, we would find that the whole principle of the Bill would collapse immediately and we would lose the case under European Union law.

So there we are: we have the Bills, but we do not really know anything about the direction of travel and what is going to happen under an imminent new Prime Minister. We have a civil aviation Bill that replaces the EU regulation of airlines and airports, including consumer protection. We welcome that, but the way in which regulations are to be made is going to be an entirely private matter for the Civil Aviation Authority. I do not think the Government have got the message. We voted Brexit to get rid of unelected bureaucrats making laws for us—but at least we had parliamentary scrutiny. We had an array of European Union committees here in your Lordships’ House that would look at those laws before they were implemented. We are to have none of that: there will be no parliamentary scrutiny of the new regulations made by the Civil Aviation Authority and to some extent by the Secretary of State. That cannot be an acceptable Bill, and it is one that we are unhappy with as a matter of principle: we can support the substance, but the mechanisms are not appropriate.

My noble friend Lord McLoughlin spoke warmly about the highways finance Bill. We support the idea of finding new mechanisms for financing the building of roads, but I am really puzzled, and I want the noble Lord to address—if not today then later, when we get to the Bill—why the regulated asset base model is an appropriate way of attracting private finance, given that we know from experience elsewhere that it tends to encourage overspecification and gold-plating, and anyway is designed for infrastructure where assets are incrementally added, such as they might be at Heathrow, rather than for building a road or a bridge, which presumably once built is built and one does not periodically add to it over time. That is something else that we are going to want to look at.

Finally, I come to the Northern Powerhouse Rail Bill. Both the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, spoke in favour of this. In fact, they spoke as if the Bill were likely to make Northern Powerhouse Rail happen: as if it were pushing it forward. I do not want to raise the anxiety level of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, but as is explained in the document produced by the Government, the Northern Powerhouse Rail Bill is actually only a renamed High Speed Rail (Crewe-Manchester) Bill. That was a Bill introduced by the Conservative Government. It was carried over into the last parliamentary Session, nothing was done with it, and it is being carried over into the current parliamentary Session. It does not build Northern Powerhouse Rail; it simply creates certain powers to take land for the purpose of building the parts around Crewe and Manchester that are necessary for Northern Powerhouse Rail. There is no objection to this Bill from our side—as I say, it was our Bill originally—but, if anyone thinks that the Government are building Northern Powerhouse Rail, I point out that there is not a penny available to build Northern Powerhouse Rail, unless the Minister is going to tell us that that is what is coming up.

I have to congratulate the Government on acceding to the Conservative Party campaign not to increase fuel duty. That is a small win and something we can call a win-win for both of us, I think.

I will conclude by referring to something for which no legislation is provided. It is not in the gracious Speech, but it is an important matter: the electric vehicles mandate. The electric vehicles mandate is already destroying our automotive industry and is going to ruin the country in many ways, destroying many jobs in relation to cars. But that is not enough for the Government, who now want to extend it to HGVs. I simply say to the Government that they really must think very carefully about this. Indeed, there is simply not enough electricity in the system to power electric HGVs. The Government must move very cautiously on the electrification of HGVs. I hope that, if not today then soon, there will be an announcement from the Government that they are going to reflect on whether this is something they really want to push forward.

We have had a gracious Speech written for His Majesty the King by the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer. We do not know, as we debate it, who is going to be the Prime Minister a few weeks from now. We do not know, as a consequence, who the Secretary of State for Transport or for Health, or the Chancellor of the Exchequer, is going to be a few weeks from now. There is a degree of unreality about this debate. I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part and treated it very seriously, and I look forward to hearing the Minister perhaps try to give some gloss to all this that will make sense of it to the rest of us.